15 Things about Vietnam #10 - Vietnamese Cool

Throughout Asia, cool has minor but essential variations, as anyone knows who has been here for more than a cocktail under a palm-tree.

In China, there is off-shore cool and mainland cool, HK cool and SH cool.

There are the various versions of Indian cool, which revolve largely around themselves (Tollywood, masala movies, kurtas with tight leggings), just as there are a vast range of Japanese cools, including everything from computerized pets ("Aibo") to stylized asexual drifting ("hervibores").

The Thais, of course, do a nice little line in sexual androgyny too. Free of Christian sex-complexes and Chinese obsessions with social self-control, they manage to sneak the idea of pleasure into a fairly traditionalist culture in a fairly cool way.

While Japanese cool takes elements of the foreign and transforms them without giving the rest of the world much of a look in, Korean cool is basically export-oriented; its main products are candy-coloured t-shirts, bloodless teen comedy and I-left-my-brain-at-home girlbands:

In plenty of Asian cities, you’ll find old colonial palaces and plenty of other ageing colonial architecture, which none of the locals find especially cool. You’ll also find the remnants of much older civilizations – standing there as mute testaments to the days before human beings needed the ideas of cool and uncool to mark the difference between social up and down, in and out, beautiful and ugly.

In all of Asia, serious money has been made in recent history, sometimes in obscene quantities. And the purchasing power of those who did the making has kick-started the sorts of commercial arts, the competitive displays, the restless imitation and change that make more things seem cool or uncool in the first place.

Being cool in Asia normally involves taking a splash in global culture – hence the fascination with the standard Western accessories, tv formats and pop-music genres. Hence also the uncoolness of a lot of Asian Cool in the minds of formidably cool Westerners who, when in Asia, tend to idealize precisely what they despair of back home in the West (oversized urban jungles, poverty) or what Asians despair of in Asia (hidebound traditions, sleepy country ways).

Hence also one of the advantages of Asian Cool: because it takes its lead a lot of the time from a kind of super-culture, global culture, it mainly avoids splitting itself into a hopeless muddle of subcultures the way Western culture does. Cool is something it is almost impossible to be in the West – what is cool in one corner of the social landscape is boring, weird or incomprehensible in the next. (Who over the age of 23 is really cool anyway? etc) To be cool in Asia all you need, at least to get started, is enough money to spend at an upmarket shopping mall.

This makes it sound as though what is cool in Asia is mainly what comes from somewhere else (the fashions and accessories of the wealthy, enviable West). But that’s much truer in some places than in others.

At its worst, Asian cool is a game of catch-up with the West, played with a conformism that is pretty hard to take. At its best, cool is also what renovates homegrown Asian tradition in any way that seems attractive, interesting or fun. And what Vietnamese girls and boys find cool is no exception.

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The latest thing to become cool in Vietnam is dancing.

Do Vietnamese kids think they can dance?

Having been taught at school to hold everything in, most are not sure whether they can, but watching other people who can (or who are trying) is definitely a whole lot of fun.

The second-latest thing to become cool in Vietnam is singing. Most Vietnamese, in their upbeat moments – and all Vietnamese men in their drunken moments – think they can. They don’t need American tv formats to convince them they can. But the imported formats (and the imported speaker-systems) definitely give the whole show a huge boost.

The thing that became cool the day before yesterday is – Korean stuff. (South Korean stuff of course. There is nothing cool in the minds of young Vietnamese about fat underage dictators or armies of goose-stepping zombies.) Vietnamese girls, particularly in Hanoi, swallow Korean fashions whole. So at the moment they go for the “boyish” look (long baggy trousers and short hair):

or the "sporty" look (big glasses frames, singlet-tops, high-riding shorts and sneakers):

(The sporty look, of course, has nothing to do with any sort of interest in sport. Most Vietnamese girls would break into a sweat at the idea of breaking into a sweat.)

Korean pop music (Bigbang, Psy, Girls Generation) effortlessly conquers the hearts and minds of Vietnamese teenagers, while the Korean film industry is considered a model for the local industry. There are essentially three types of Korean film that find their way into Vietnamese cinemas: quirky comedies, quirky horror films and quirky “historical” films – the latter being thinly disguised comedies in which ancient Korean princes talk like witty Seoul teenagers.

Compare Korean historical films with the vast quantities of historical pastiche being churned out in HK and SH. In Vietnam, Chinese historical dramas are basically fodder for retirees and car-park attendants. Full of the same bitchy princesses, the same growling monarchs, and the same endless Ang-Lee-inspired effects, they have a relatively small following which doesn't let on too much about its Sinophilic habits. Such is the enmity between the two countries, no matter how rich the Chinese get, the Vietnamese are never going to accept that the Chinese are cool in any essential way.

While there’s no question of them bumping the Koreans for the top spot on the list of cool Asian nations, the Thais are definitely also getting cooler in Vietnam. It’s a little difficult to know how this happened. Plenty of middle class Vietnamese go to Thailand for holidays. To many of them the Thais seem more relaxed than the folk back home. They make better films than the Vietnamese (slightly better films). They have less hang-ups about sex. Not being a nation of ethnic purebreads, many Thais look Asian in a less hard-boiled way; Vietnamese admire them their longer noses and deeper-set eyes. And though Thai politics, like Vietnamese politics, involves some hefty prohibitions (never saying mean things about the king, etc), it lacks the heaviness of Vietnamese politics. Hey, the teams are colour-coded, just like an old-fashioned game show! Until the junta moves in . . .

For anyone in the market for darker experiences, there's no denying that Japanese manga taps authentic feelings of anxiety, plus a whole lot of raw desire, that other cool products - and the wider scene of Vietnamese culture - don't give much of a look in. Some of it crosses teenage fantasies of desirability and violence in fairly obvious ways:

Some of it muffles its anxiety in camp gesture or cheap romanticism:

But a lot of the time it speaks the boredom and pain of being young, Asian and middle class in pretty pure form.

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Korean music and Japanese manga are very cool in Asian terms. But the more time you spend in Asia, the more you realize a lot of Asians find being Asian a bit déclassé. It’s Western bodies and Western souls a lot of Vietnamese kids really want – soul referring here to two things: among 20-somethings to the possibilities of deep romantic experience, among teenagers to the upended version of the concept, with 2.5 emotions: love, hate and m’eh, all on the outside.

In Vietnam, looking too Vietnamese is definitely uncool. The aim of the Vietnamese girls who care about these things – which is a lot of Vietnamese girls – is to adapt classical Vietnamese standards to the main Western ideals of beauty and attractiveness. (This does not mean junking classical Vietnamese ideals of beauty. Some of the time it means redoubling the force of classical imperatives and prohibitions.)

Fair skin has always been considered desirable in these parts of East Asia. But with Western models to live up to, buying the expensive cosmetics and applying them daily to make yourself look as un-yellow as possible has become big business. With more Western noses on display, more Vietnamese women find they can’t live with the short, stubby arrangement they already have. The list of cool surgical adjustments has also come to include eyelid snips, boob jobs and major jaw reconstructions. Thin, longish noses and heavy breasts are about as sought after, and about as readily purchased, by Vietnamese girls as ugly, “posh” handbags and upmarket mobile phones. (Because it's a sure-fire way of looking sort-of Western, actually being Eurasian has become very, very cool.)

Then there is Western food. Vietnamese kids are taking to Burger King, KFC and McDonalds in a big way, even though, by comparison with Vietnamese street food, Western fast food is vastly expensive.

They also love going out for coffee and cakes – bad, pseudo-Western iced-coffees with turrets of whipped cream which they drink with bad, pseudo-Western cakes, mass-produced on South Korean machine lines. Thank God the homely Viet version of the coffee date is still an option for young couples. Kicking back beside a canal in a double-deckchair with your boyfriend and a delicious glass of straight Vietnamese coffee is still considered normal and can be done in a cool sort of way.

While as yet there’s nothing in Vietnam to compare to the behaviours of Western foodies, young Vietnamese with disposable income are starting to attribute significant amounts of subcultural cool to particular culinary styles or a broad range of culinary experiences. Vietnam doesn’t have the heavily-hyped restaurant openings or the competitive public assertions of culinary sophistication that middle–class bogans go in for in Western countries. But it does have restauranteurs and cooking game-shows and you can tell they’re starting to have an impact on the stock of inherited Vietnamese ideas because many Vietnamese men nowadays actually speak with pride about knowing how to cook. (Traditionally, plenty of Vietnamese men have always known how to cook - their seedy bachelor days saw to that. But of course no traditional Vietnamese guy would admit he could cook, because he wouldn’t want to have to do the cooking any longer than it took to find a wife to cook for him.)

Though middle class Vietnamese dream of going to Singapore for long-weekends, the same way middle class Americans dream of going to London and Paris, for the super-rich it's Western locations - the US, Australia, Europe - that are the really cool places to holiday and shop. Taking an interest in Western culture when holidaying in a Western locale is considered slightly ridiculous and old-fashioned. No matter how many letters to the editor get written about how shameful it is for Vietnamese to come back from the West knowing nothing more than the price of standard consumer goods, the same thing keeps on happening: fashionable

In the movie stakes, Koreans supply the spooks but Americans supply the explosions - and the repetitious fantasies of moral redemption, which Vietnamese teenagers are much less interested in than the explosions. In the music stakes, a lot of youngsters take a passing interest in Bruno Mars, Brittney Spears or Lady Gaga. Having little idea what these people are trying to assert the coolness of – and no idea what the lyrics mean – most go back to listening to Vietnamese pop music pretty quickly.

Western clothes are considered very cool. And, I have to say, they are very cool. But why?

To a Western eye, the first night nerves young Asians experience on the stage of global history, the light air of formality that informs their everyday ways, seem beautifully offset by a denim jacket or a flannelette shirt.

The general rush to borrow from the wardrobe of Western style doesn’t mean traditional Vietnamese costumes are looked down on though. No Vietnamese girl finds being a bridesmaid boring - traditional Vietnamese áo dài are the best dress-ups ever, almost as cool as mini-skirts and stilettos:

However, the ultimate fashion accessory in today’s Vietnam would have to be the tattoo.

Tattoos are probably the most controversial aspect of Vietnamese cool, especially for girls.

The first thing to remember here is that in Vietnam there is a deep-seated taboo that girls are breaking in getting a tattoo. Tats fly in the face of the traditional East Asian belief that when you die you’re supposed to deliver your body whole and unblemished to the realm of the spirits if you want your spirit to rest in peace. So for most older Vietnamese, tats are for unsavoury characters who are not interested in the fate of their souls - gangsters, hookers and the like.

From a negative point of view, tats might seem like a long-winded exercise in pissing off parents and a self-reinforcing statement of your identity as fashionable and free: if, as a progressive Vietnamese 23 year old, you went through the pain of getting the thorn-anklet (the muscly love heart, the slowly blue-ing slogan, etc), then what you say about being different from your parents must be true, right?

The debates about tattoos that take place in Vietnamese social media are not that different from the ones Westerners were having with their parents over Xmas lunch late in the past millennium. What Vietnamese girls with tats argue online in their own defense rings pretty true. In short, they say, quite believably, that they continue to love and respect mum and dad, in spite of their thorn anklet - that the thorn anklets are there to express to the world the beauty of their souls.

Vietnamese girl’s tats exist to eternalize the inspiration of a single moment, to express the poignance of the single, irrevocable decision. They are as cool as romanticism itself – the Western cult of deep individual emotion which, with a few adjustments for Vietnamese sensibility, is one of the biggest shows in town in today’s Vietnam.

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So if that’s pretty much what’s cool in today’s Vietnam, what do Vietnamese girls and boys find uncool?

This is where the broad differences between Asian cool and Western cool come out.

Tattoos aside, one of the main differences between Vietnamese cool and Western cool is that rebelling against your parents is not considered cool in Vietnam. (Vietnamese Cool, you’d have to say, is not yet Rebellious.)

As in the West, in Vietnam no one’s parents are cool. In the West, that’s basically because the engines of fashion have been turning over quite fast for decades, leaving anybody who seriously adopted cool stuff from previous decades feeling light years behind what is being adopted by the kids of today, or, at best, feeling admired by the kids of today for the 30 seconds it takes to recycle the styles of the past and then move on.

In Vietnam, the reason no one’s parents are cool is very different – because everyone over 30 was brought up during the war or during the period of post-war austerity.

In the West, no one’s parents are cool. And they’re a little difficult to love because of that. Giving them and everything they stand for a good little kick in the teeth, especially if they stand for jobs, mortgages, values-based education and nutritious food, has been considered a pathway, if not to long-term self-respect, then at least to a certain social cred, for numerous generations.

In Vietnam, though no one’s parents are cool, kids, in the main, still adore their parents. Of course, there is tension and, occasionally, tragic conflict, when parents stand on the side of convention and kids find themselves drawn to unconventional ways of life. But systematic spite, or stylized gestures of defiance, are not encouraged and not in general circulation. Young Vietnamese who seriously don’t like the deal served up to them by their parents usually fly the family nest and get on with living cooler, more open-ended lives without making a big deal about it.

Next, there is sex, drugs and rock n roll. None of these three is particularly cool.

In Vietnam, sex, you could say, is not yet cool.

True: flashing the flesh has definitely become a huge social phenomenon in Vietnamese cities, where shorts have been getting shorter, jeans tighter, necklines rakinger and shoes kinkier for the better part of the last two decades. (Good manners, on the other hand, went out of fashion in 1997.)

And true: actually being hung-up about sex is uncool. One of the more serious reasons parents are considered uncool is because of the anxiety that older Vietnamese people feel about free-form social relations between men and women – any sort of free-form public relations between men and women, not just free-form sexual relations. Traditional Vietnamese culture is considered hopelessly backward, especially by some young Vietnamese women, because of its obsession with female chastity and domesticity – the traditional insistence that the main social role of women is to be masters of “gia chính” - an interesting word which can either mean “domestic arts” or “household chores”.

But none of this means that sex itself is considered particularly sexy. Vietnamese girls do not talk to each other, let alone to boys or anyone else, about how much they’re getting. 95% of Vietnamese girls would never kiss a boy experimentally with no thought for the future, and no Vietnamese girl would loudly have sex with her boyfriend in her bedroom to teach her parents a lesson. Vietnamese teenagers are not primed to think of sex as the most meaningful experience of their lives. They do not obsessively contemplate the ritual of losing their virginity. Nor are they encouraged by Vietnamese pop culture to pretend that they know more about sex than they “ought” to.

All the stories run by Vietnamese Cosmo about the mysteries and thrills of sex seem irrelevant, a little pretentious. They are contained in a section called – in English, not Vietnamese – “Love and Lust”. If you ever get really good at Vietnamese and try reading this stuff (which I don't recommend) then you’ll quickly realize that the rather Western backstory of the love/lust distinction is lost on Vietnamese 20-somethings. Who the hell are Adam and Eve? In which James Cameron film were they the main item?

Young Vietnamese men probably consume about as much pornography as men in the rest of the world and many of them probably pick up dumb ideas about huge racks and shaking booty as a result. (Those ideas seem particularly dumb in Vietnam, given how slender Vietnamese women tend to be.) But with the majority of high-speed internet connections still found in very public places, boys still tend to get most of their kicks from online violence rather than online sexual depravity.

The sexualized antics of Vietnamese stars – everyone from Elly Trần and Angela Phương Trinh to Hồ Ngọc Hà – are seen by both boys and girls as entertaining, rather than impressive. The most credible of the three, Hồ Ngọc Hà (a singer, below), looks mainly like an upmarket calisthenics instructor:

Once she has stopped swiveling and thrusting on-stage, she becomes as stiff and proper as any middle-aged Vietnamese housewife. Elly Trần and Angela Phương Trinh, who are famous for showing off their breasts in public, have, by definition, lost the plot. Neither are even remotely cool.

Alternative sexual practices, it must be said, have quite a lot of cool potential. Vietnamese gay and lesbian folk have their own styles and their own stereotypes, which have been captured memorably in some very good Vietnamese films. (For an intro, try this one and this one). There's even a minor cult of gay love among certain straight (slightly bent) Vietnamese girls. What we are talking about are imported Japanese novels, both literary and graphic, that canvass a full range of issues, from wistful glances across flowing streams to full-blown pillow-biting of the Richard Amory variety.

While many younger Vietnamese are quite comfortable with the idea of homosexuality, but quite anxious about the possibility of actually being gay, mainstream Vietnamese culture is just anxious and in denial. Possibly the worst aspect of the situation are the insults Vietnamese movie directors deliver to the LGBT community in mainstream films on a regular basis. Every year sees the release of a couple of home-grown comedies whose main character is a cheap caricature of an ugly, not very intelligent woman - and whose plot inevitably involves him/her having to get over a crush on the straight male lead.

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Unlike in the West, drugs are unambiguously very uncool in today's Vietnam.

Very few Vietnamese kids feel the need to unwind with a spot of weed or bend their Friday nights into interesting shapes with Ecstasy. (Quite cool Vietnamese kids approve of the death penalty, which the Vietnamese government makes regular use of for drug offences.) Likewise, very few people in Vietnam fall for the bohemian argument that drugs are a laudable, really rather sexy, form of protest against bad social reality or a vehicle of personal expression or in some sense mind-expanding, “philosophical”.

Medium-ranking police officials on the other hand get interviewed on tv by breathless junior reporters whenever they conduct successful drug raids. The job of the reporters in such situations is to express a certain sort of frisky admiration; the job of the cops is to sound as if no one has ever put one past them in the history of the world. Coolness is something it is obviously pretty easy to exude when you have a 20 year-old intern getting het up about what you had for breakfast on the morning of the big bust. Plain-clothes police in Vietnam are definitely quite hip.

Again, while it is considered uncool to worry too much (eg like your parents) about female drunkenness, regularly getting drunk for Vietnamese women is definitely not cool either. Drinking expensive cocktails is for tryhards. Cavorting on table-tops for the benefit (i.e. torment) of heavily drinking men is for sluts. And drinking with the heavily drinking men, the way some Western girls do – because female equality means taking men on in the various pissing contests that their social lives revolve around, doesn’t it? – is not considered even remotely admirable or courageous. (Being a heavy drinking Vietnamese guy though is quite cool, if it shows you know how to enjoy yourself.)

As for rock n roll – well, some middle-aged Vietnamese folk have heard of The Rolling Stones and Queen, but frankly as a nation Vietnam was up to slightly different stuff during the heyday of Western pop culture - fighting major wars and picking up the pieces for example. Most of the various sub-moods that were minted by the greats of American pop and rock had lost most of their attraction before Vietnam was ready for them.

Rock n roll at its best, you might say, helped Western 20-somethings express a range of negative truths about how angry or disillusioned life made them feel in the gilded cage of Western society from the 60's onwards. It captured certain heroic sensations of quixotry, desolation. It gave voice to a bit of rogue male tenderness of heart (or at least offset the blasé cult of male toughness that a lot of other rock n roll was about). It also let loose the eloquence, intelligence and general sassiness of women who wanted to make up their own lives. 

None of these cultural gestures means that much in a Vietnamese context. Vpop – which is the overwhelming exception to the rule that Vietnamese cool comes from outside Vietnam – hardly bothers with minority emotions or negative truths. About the only sensation it is interested in is teenage love gone bad; year after year, the Vpop machine churns out the same old videos of gym-fit boy-men emoting into the stratosphere:

Oh, and quite a few of Hồ Ngọc Hà doing what the idea of love gone bad makes Hồ Ngọc Hà want to do – close her eyes, shake her glossy mane and go round and round in circles. . .

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As this list indicates, what’s cool today in Vietnam hardly invests at all in the deeper attitudinal complexes of Western cool and maybe this is what gives it its special air of groundless drifting, pure spectacle. Depending on how you look at it, you can see it as a playful, purely aesthetic phenomenon, or as a particularly self-absorbed form of consumerism. Asia, it has to be said, has known its floating worlds before, but nothing even vaguely like this.

For better or worse, one of the other main things that is not cool in Vietnam is irony. Like sex, irony, you’d have to say, is not yet cool – the Vietnamese, at this stage of developments, are not yet ready to mock their own drift into materialism, and they are still too attached to the communist idea of the nation to mock seriously at political authority. Vietnamese humour still has something gentle and positive about it - something that to Westerners feels totally before the fall. In general, if you put your tongue too far in your cheek in Vietnam nowadays, the kids will just not get it. Saying one thing and meaning another is neither cool nor uncool, it’s incomprehensible.

Last of all, there's politics. One of the complicated issues it is definitely worth pointing out about Vietnamese social life nowadays is how uncool politics has become. Yes, a lot of young Vietnamese feel an abstract admiration for the achievements of the nation under Communist leadership (mainly – winning the war). Yes, they appreciate that Uncle Hồ and General Giáp had their understated style and their robust political beliefs – and a considerable willingness to stick up for them. Maybe some younger Vietnamese have fond memories of the fun they had as kids at Party-sponsored jamborees. But all of this is coupled with a nigh-on total lack of interest in either the politics or the policy-settings of the Communist Party.

No section in a Vietnamese bookshop goes more untouched than the corner devoted to political doctrine. No subjects within the school curriculum are considered more deadly than the introduction to Marx and Lenin and the drills in Communist history which all Vietnamese kids get put through.

The standard response you’ll get from a Vietnamese 20-something, if you ask what the slogan on one of the million big red banners actually means is – Who knows? Why are they always 50-feet long? The Vietnamese Communist Party doesn’t seem to have adjusted to one of the basic conditions of urban living – that an idea or image, to be lodged in the mind of casual passers-by, has to be compact enough to be taken in with a quick sweep of the eye.

Membership of the Party is still something Vietnamese go in for in order to realize worthy social goals, not just because it’s the best way to move up in the world. But imbuing the party with any of the attributes of cool is the last thing on their minds – either on the minds of Vietnam’s leaders, or the country's politically rather mellow citizens.

There’s almost certainly a method to this. Live in Vietnam for a couple of years and you might find yourself thinking that the Vietnamese Communist Party is happy to seem as boring as possible because it doesn’t want to be subject to the iron law of cool: that what is cool one day will become uncool the next.

Vietnamese cool, like Asian cool in general, has a very definitely bearable lightness. Political ideals, let alone political realities, are by comparison unbearably heavy. Vietnamese cool floats along on the assumption that both the ideals and the realities can be safely put to one side. And in this it's pretty similar to other regional versions of Asian cool too.

15 Things about Vietnam #9 - Haggling

Haggling is a basic fact of economic existence in Vietnam. All Vietnamese accept it and some actually enjoy it. Reacting to it with irritation or moral outrage is counter-productive and culturally naive.

If you want to go shopping in Vietnam, you are going to have to learn to haggle.

If the business of haggling seems essentially dishonest, or if in practice it makes your blood boil, then - don't go shopping in Vietnam. Or maybe don't go to Vietnam full-stop. Or, if you absolutely must go and you really want to go shopping, then go with some Vietnamese friends and get them to buy your stuff for you, preferably when you're out of eyeshot of the vendor.

For your day-to-day needs, haggling in Vietnam can, sort of, be avoided. If it's toothpaste you want to buy, then go to a supermarket. If it's a tv, then go to a big electronics retailer. In both places a fixed price will be displayed on the item, so there'll be no need to eyeball a salesman at close range or put up with him craftily misunderstanding everything you say about payment and price.

However in most locations where buying and selling occurs, haggling can't be avoided. It can't be avoided at markets. It can't be avoided at small shops. And it definitely can't be avoided when organising a ride with a motorbike taxi-driver (aka a Hondaman) or being fined by the police for a minor (or imaginary) traffic violation.

To your pain, you might also find that Vietnamese people who consider themselves your friends will want to haggle with you over any costs you incur together. Even dividing up the electricity bill in a shared house might involve a degree of hard-bargaining which in your friend's mind will in no way detract from his warm feelings for you.

If a Vietnamese person, friend or foe, tells you a price that you know is a lot more than the going Vietnamese price, it doesn't always mean they are trying to rip you off. They might think of it more as an invitation to start haggling; and they almost certainly assume that because they're comfortable with haggling, then the rest of the world must be too. So be prepared, above all with the facts - make sure you have a rough idea what the going Vietnamese price is and consider beforehand how much you're willing to pay: that is, how much you're realistically willing to cop, not how much you'd like to pay in some sort of Vietnamese-themed fantasy land of fairytale cheapness. Last off all, take a deep breath and - put in an opening bid.

Whatever you do, don't take the inflated prices as a personal affront; they are offered to all Western tourists and to most Vietnamese who aren't regular customers as well.

Put in your opening bid - that's right: come back at the vendor with a price that is below the going price and then try to get things to come up to a rough median. And if the vendor won't wear the rough median? Then walk away with nary an angry word. This will hopefully have an instant effect: the vendor will consent to begin haggling from scratch. If you're lucky, the Hondaman who has just been demanding $10 to drive you 1km down the road will come chasing after you, offering a much better price because in reality he needs the fare. Your stiff resistance to his ludicrously inflated price has convinced him that you have a grip on reality too.

Remember, last of all, that successful haggling takes patience. There's no way you're going to get a fair price out of a regular Vietnamese street vendor and be on your way in 30 seconds. More than that, successful haggling requires an ability to be (in Western terms) a little bit shameless. Street vendors who feel you're getting the price down too close to the going Vietnamese price will surely try to mobilize their best weapon of attack - the Western buyer's sense of cultural embarrassment. This is usually fairly easy to do - upon hearing your latest, perfectly reasonable offer, the vendor will start shrieking in Vietnamese as if you're trying to perpetrate a crime. (This usually has a multiplier effect: other street vendors and various other bystanders come running to the scene and some of them start shrieking too.)

Now your haggling skills are being severely tested. Ignore the bystanders and repeat the offer you just made (the one that started off the amateur theatrics). Don't be afraid to raise your voice and use your hands.

If you're planning a longer stay in Vietnam, you might want to add some Vietnamese terminology to your haggling repertoire. When the little old lady proposes a price you know is an outrageous multiple of the going Vietnamese price, smile sagely and say "Xạo bà cổ" - "You're making stuff up, old lady". (Of course, you'll need some help from your Vietnamese friends to get the accent right.) Or try out a different phrase: "bị chém đẹp". "Bị chém đẹp" means to have your throat cut "the beautiful way". Get the accent right, and you'll knock the old lady's socks off. She might even give you a discount.

Doesn't sound too difficult? Does it even sound that different from the sorts of bargaining that Westerners are perfectly happy to enter into over house prices or salary packages? Let's not pretend that Western economic ethics are all that different, let alone more high-minded, than Vietnamese economic ethics. (Let's also not forget that in Mediterranean Europe haggling is a habit, or a past-time, just like in Vietnam.)

Across the board, you might find that Vietnamese go in for moderately sharper sales practices than Westerners. Plenty of Vietnamese see outright lying about their products and services as legitimate if it helps them to make a living under difficult conditions - and normal economic conditions in Vietnam are tough. Vietnamese real estate agents, for example, tend to be real bottom feeders - even worse than what you get on the East Coast of Australia and the West Coast of the US. No matter how specific you are about what you're looking for, most will show you anything they have on the books, lie about its price and features, then try to heavy you into renting it.

But whether this kind of behaviour suggests that Vietnamese, when operating in market places, are more comfortable than Westerners with commercial dishonesty is arguable even at the best of times. In the West, you might say, there's a serious possibility that commercial rip-offs will be exposed by the media; there are government agencies and consumer advocates whose job is to investigate complaints and, in the case of serious fraudulence, there's the law. None of them are foolproof ways of preventing rip-offs. But they probably strike fear into the hearts of many potential rip-off merchants.

The set-up in Vietnam is a bit different. The Vietnamese press sometimes reports major rip-offs that have obvious effects on the health of the general public or lead to the financial ruination of war widows. But with less institutional arrangements in place to alert the world to the activities of ripoff merchants, there are inevitably quite a few more ripoffs. Buyer be doubly beware.

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Markets, according to some guidebooks, are a beautiful and lively manifestation of Vietnamese urban culture. But don't go to them if artificially inflated prices are going to get on your nerves. Often the best thing to do at a Vietnamese market is just wander and look. If it's the meat section of the market you're visiting, leave any moral presuppositions you have about food and food preparation at the entrance. The Vietnamese sell fish and poultry live. They also sell the internal organs of beasts and fowls by the bucket:

In big Vietnamese cities there are two types of market - the tourist attractions selling snacks and knick-knacks:

and the suburban places that cater mainly to locals:

You can expect to have the sh*t bargained out of you in both locations unless you know what you're doing.

Don't be fooled by Western blog material about the authenticity of Vietnamese markets. The picturesque poverty and bad smells often hide some unlikely stories. The hearty middle-aged women sitting on miniature plastic stools slicing up pork chops, with blood up to their elbows, can be expert price gougers, forcing primary producers to sell for a song and end users to pay three times over. As messy and poor as the denizens of a Vietnamese market can look, their hard labour often brings in 10 times the wage of lowly government officials. All Vietnamese market goers know this - and use it to inform their haggling practices.

Lastly, don't think you can escape the necessity of haggling if, stepping out of the market, you go for a walk along one of those classic rows of Vietnamese shops that are all selling the same thing.

To newcomers, they represent one of the economic mysteries of Vietnamese life; intuitively, you'd think it was poor business strategy to have all the fan-shops or lock-shops in a city set up next to each other with nothing at all to differentiate product-range. Apparently, the arrangement works for the Vietnamese though. (Apparently the idea is that if everyone in a city knows where all the fan-shops are then there'll be more sales of fans than there would have been if there were one fan shop in every district.)

The arrangement doesn't work so well for Westerners in search of bargains. As the prospective owner of a new fan - and a competent haggler capable of putting into practice all of the wise advice contained in this blog-entry - you might think you could get one of the fan shops to sneak a sale off its competitors by undercutting them on price. Surely such markets work in the buyer's favour?

Not if there's solid collusion between the fan shops. With a tacit agreement on price in place along the fan-strip, everyone's free to charge you what they like, no matter how good your haggling skills are.

*

That might be the rough deal as far as haggling goes, but what about Vietnamese attitudes to money in general? What you'll probably notice when you first come to Vietnam is how much Vietnamese like to talk about money. Generally speaking, it isn't considered rude to talk about how much money you have or how much you paid for stuff. Among Vietnamese nouveau riche it's considered compulsory, as it is among nouveau riche people pretty much everywhere in the world.

To open a conversation with a stranger, in Australia people start by asking what job the other guy does. As a follow up, you ask what suburb he lives in - which of course is code for how much money he has. (In Melbourne of course you also ask what school the other guy went to - which is code for how much money his parents have.)

All this is completely different in Vietnam, where you will be asked openly by complete strangers about four things: how old you are, whether you are married, how tall you are in centimetres and - how much money you earn per month. (In everyday Vietnamese: "Một tháng b'nhiêu?")

If a Vietnamese stranger asks you this last question, it doesn't mean he is sizing up how much money he can take you for. (Occasionally it might mean that.) In Vietnam, asking a stranger about his income is just a way of showing friendly interest; it's actually an attempt to be polite, rather than aninfringement against etiquette.

Of course, there are more and more Westerners in this world who don't have any sort of old-fashioned middle-class inhibitions when it comes to talking about money. As far as I could tell from my most recent trip back to Sydney, the favourite topics of conversation in middle Australia nowadays, in descending order of interest, are how much people pay for their (a) houses, (b) cars (c) designer jockstraps (d) pets' physio. I'm guessing thing are equally grim in most corners of the Western world.

Put it this way. If, as a Westerner, you grew up in the sort of middle class home where mentioning the price of things or asking people how much they earn was considered boorish - then you're in for a shock in Vietnam.

Put the shock in cultural context. Educated middle-class Vietnamese tend to know that Westerners are uncomfortable talking about certain details of their lives. However there are plenty of not-so-middle class Vietnamese who will ask you straight up about the contents of your bank account or your weight in kilos. Don't hold it against them; most of them are fully convinced that they're being the most amiable people in the world.

15 Things about Vietnam #8 - Idealizing The West

Vietnamese idealize Westerners in many unpredictable ways. They think that the height, fair skin and long noses of Westerners are vastly enviable. Some of them also fondly imagine that Western societies are comfortable, safe places to live, that a Western education is a ticket to knowledge and success and that public institutions in the West are run for the public good in a spirit of Enlightenment and efficiency.

Let's start with the way the Vietnamese see Western bodies.

Younger Vietnamese women nowadays worry a lot about being short and they yearn to have fair skin and "high" noses. In the hope of attaining these things by artificial means, some of them get around in monstrous 4-inch flip-flops and apply vast amounts of skin-bleaching lotion to their bodies on a daily basis. As soon as they can afford it, many have surgery to add a little something their small, flattish noses.

Inevitably what they do on top of all this is look up to Western women for having the attributes of contemporary beauty they feel they lack. And they praise, and sometimes chase after, Western men who have the attributes too.

If you go to the supermarket in Vietnam and you're more than 5'8'', don't be surprised if the Vietnamese around you start spontaneously going "Cao!" ("My she's tall!") when they see you. Try to get in the spirit a little if they want to nestle against your ribcage and have their photo taken:

Don't be surprised as a woman or a man if Vietnamese pay you wild compliments on your long legs and don't be frightened if they want to touch your "high" nose, pat your blonde hair or gaze for several moments into your blue eyes.

Guys, if Vietnamese women do any of these things to you, it doesn't mean they want to have your babies, it probably just means they're frankly surprised at what they're seeing.

Girls, if a 55 year old Vietnamese man with a crooked smile turns his head through a full 180 degrees to look at you as you go past in the street, it doesn't mean you have a stalker on your hands, all it probably means is that he's seeing Western Woman, live and in motion, for the first time.

Question: how did things come to be this way in Vietnam? How did Western body types, and Western faces, come to be so widely idealized? Part of the answer lies in the way Vietnam has opened itself up to the world since the early 1990's. Hollywood, women's magazines and the advertising industry have been beaming images of Western glamour into the country for more than 20 years now and all the imagery is associated uncritically by many Vietnamese with wealth, success and comfort. The more long-legged models Vietnamese people see on Western catwalks, the more buff bodies they see applying deodorant to capacious Western armpits, the more they have come to admire these things in Western visitors to Vietnam. And the more they've tried to re-create their own bodies in the same image.

Part of it though has nothing to do with chasing after the physical attributes of Western glamour. Vietnamese are not inclined to admire the white-ish complexion of Westerners because they've started secretly looking down on their own yellow-ish skin again, the way some of them did when Vietnam was a French colony. The reason they idealize whiteness is because they've always idealized it. In Vietnam, and in most of East Asia, very fair skin has been considered beautiful throughout most of history. No amount of socialist messaging about the beauty of manual labour has rid the Vietnamese of their ideal image of female beauty: a woman who has never had to do hard physical work in the sun.

If having porcelain skin has become an increasing obsession in recent times, it's because tv and the internet have exposed the Vietnamese - not just to Western body images, but to neighbouring Asian societies where the white ideal reigns supreme. Korea and Japan are the other places Vietnam gets its modern ideas about itself from. Both produce a vast range of skin-care products that supposedly put the white ideal within everybody's reach; the fetish for whiteness is the result of a new-fangled marriage of traditional aesthetics and modern consumerism, rather than the subtle re-emergence of old racial stereotypes.

This doesn't mean that Vietnamese find Westerners universally attractive or Western bodies universally enviable. There are a host of things about Western bodies that Vietnamese don't like or simply don't get - things that for Westerners themselves are normal but many Asians find positively ugly.

Because Vietnamese men hardly ever go bald, Vietnamese find male baldness quite troubling. On the other hand, they find general hairiness a real eyesore. (Male chest hair is not a sign of virility, it's a sign you are "chưa tiến hoá hết" - not yet fully evolved). And while some amount of blubber on a man is a sign that he has, in some sense, "made it", plump Western women are viewed with a mixture of pity and fear. (On the other hand, the way Western girls expose their skin to the tropical Vietnamese sun, letting it go an aggressive rosy hue, is just plain stupid.)

Vietnamese agree that Westerners who come to Vietnam tend to dress appallingly; they don't cover up enough of what isn't worth seeing about their bodies. To a normal inhabitant of Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi, a half-drunk Australian wandering round the backpacker quarter of the city in a wife-beater and board shorts is a figure of nightmare. Girl backpackers with their muscles, their manly posture and their Asian-inspired gap-year hairdos are exotic in a bad way. . .

Although younger generations of Vietnamese might be slowly changing their minds on the issue of tattoos, older generations are still pretty much stuck where Western parents were 30 - 40 years ago: tattoos are trashy, especially on women.

Most of the younger generation would never get a tat for fear of scaring off a potential employer or starting their mothers howling at the moon.

So if you're a Vietnamese boy from a normal family and your girlfriend has a tat, then if you have any intention of taking her home to meet the p's, you know you're standing on the stairway to hell . . .

*

Tomorrow I'll talk about the funny ideas Vietnamese have about Westerners and money. But for today let's talk about the picture Vietnamese have of Western society in general. Needless to say, it is a very rosy picture. Which often works in Westerners' favour when they go to Vietnam. And which often works against Vietnamese who go to Western countries.

Vietnamese idealize Western education to the point where any higher degree will make you an attractive member of faculty at a Vietnamese University. Unfortunately, they also idealize Western education to the point where Vietnamese international students find it difficult to recognize the deep flaws in the Western universities they spend small Vietnamese fortunes enrolling in.

Let me talk for the time being about Australia, which (depending on the value of the Australian dollar) is where most Vietnamese international students aspire to go.

To be sure, your average Australian university lives up to standards of professionalism and organization that most Vietnamese universities fail to meet. And to be sure, the outright sale of degrees is rare in Australian universities - much rarer than in the darker corners of the Vietnamese university system. But none of that changes the basic facts (a) that academic standards have been on the slide in Australian universities for decades; (b) that a whole lot of purely vocational subjects have been lumped in with more academic offerings to give them a veneer of intellectual respectability; and (c) that over time the whole process of acquiring a tertiary education in Australia and the wider Western world has been subject to a sort of galloping inflation: Australian universities increasingly make their money providing higher and higher degrees that are of little intellectual substance (and often of little practical substance) to local students who need a degree to compete in the job market - and to international students whose main aim has little to do with education and much more to do with getting a ticket to stay in the country.

This system is not exactly designed to rip off international students. But because the universities are obliged to pretend that the main purpose of the whole process is education, rather than immigration, two big issues tend to get swept under the carpet: firstly, the fact that migration to places like Australia is getting more and more difficult by the year and secondly the fact that an expensive Australian university degree doesn't necessarily help you migrate to Australia anyway.

Specifically, a large number of Vietnamese students choose courses in fields that are on the Australian government's list of priority professions in the hope that at the end of their three-year degree they'll be able to slot neatly into a job - only to find three years later that their field of choice has slipped off the government list. And while many internationals enjoy being beyond the range of parental supervision, real liberty is out of the question. All but the super-rich can afford to devote themselves to study without working on the side, so Vietnamese internationals, like those from other countries, often work long hours for unscrupulous employers who pay them half the regular Australian wage. Then there are the language issues. To cope with the practical challenges of living in a strange new place, a lot of Vietnamese internationals spend their whole time surrounded by other Vietnamese internationals. In three years of university study, their English often ends up getting worse.

On top of it all is the psychological pressure applied by parents and relatives to stay and start a new life - the perceived shame associated with going back to Vietnam if you fail to make your way. Given the vast sums Vietnamese families shell out for Australian degrees, and the vague hopes some of them have about moving the whole family over in the long-term, stress levels among international students are often very high indeed.

Education is not the only thing that recent Vietnamese arrivals to Australia have slightly naive ideas about though. Most Vietnamese back home who are thinking about joining relatives in Australia imagine that Australia is not just an affluent country (which compared to Vietnam it is), but that the wealth is spread fairly evenly and hard work is all you need to get your hands on some of it. Many recent migrants are urban Vietnamese who don't realize that, in making the move to Australia, they are swapping a solid spot roughly half way up the Vietnamese social ladder for an uncomfortable spot close to the bottom of the Australian social ladder. The perceived glamour of moving to Australia, which of course only applies in the Vietnamese social universe, is all that counts. The intense lack of glamour of actually living in Australia is something they willfully ignore.

Then there are the Vietnamese back home who are interested in politics (often the ones who are down on the Communist Party) who tend to have a range of fixed ideas about Western society ranging from the mildly unrealistic to the wildly fantastic. To a certain sort of Vietnamese mind, the West is not just affluent, but deeply meritocratic. Western governments (on this picture) provide generously for their citizens' health and education. Elderly folk enjoy comfortable pensions and unemployed folk get generous government assistance. Western-style politics across the board is deeply liberal - a career in government is open to talent and personal idealism, plus Western constitutions afford formal protections to freedom of speech and association which play themselves out every day of the week in substantial political words and deeds (for instance in the freedom with which anti-communist Vietnamese can now start denouncing the ills of Vietnamese communism). Western political parties provide a veritable festival of political diversity; they compete for the votes of the citizenry in free elections whose results are not subject to manipulation by the rich and powerful, or any other sort of systematic distortion.

Unfortunately what this picture turns out to be is an upside-down image of what is lacking in Vietnam. Vietnam is not (yet) particularly affluent. Wealth and power (above all government connections) enable people in Vietnam to corner the best jobs and the most lucrative economic opportunities. The Vietnamese state keeps a moderately tight rein on public opinion and it provides little in the way of old-age pensions or universal health care. It actively directs the press. It monitors the internet for subversive activity. And if it doesn't like the sort of association or speech you are going in for, it will tell you in no uncertain terms to go home and put a sock in it.

The great age of freedom, justice and universal prosperity are clearly yet to dawn in Vietnam.

But unfortunately they are yet to dawn in places like Australia either.

You don't have to be Max Weber to see that the main feature of Australian politics are out-sized party machines operating in a media-dominated political landscape where people are encouraged to engage in politics purely at the level of spectacle. Behind the scenes, money flows readily into the war-chests of political parties from a range of sources - all of whom expect their interests to be looked after once their preferred candidates get into power. Indeed the state itself covers the cost of political parties - with the vast majority of the funding channeled directly into the two main party-machines.

The most practical application of Western freedom of speech seems to be people getting absurdly hot under the collar; judged by everyday political life , liberal democracy looks to be less about letting the people choose their political representatives, and more about letting them explain what a gutful they've had of everything to various professional rabble-rousers and pollsters. And while Asian Australians seem to be better represented in public office than Asian Americans, that doesn't stop ordinary Australians making active use of the right to free speech to tell them to go back to where they came from on a regular basis.

As for generous education and welfare provisions, it's easy enough for migrants to see that plenty of the schools they send their kids to are dysfunctional and unemployment benefits deliberately meagre. To a potential Vietnamese migrant back in Vietnam, $180/fortnight seems like a fantastic sum of money - it's an average Vietnamese monthly wage. To an actual Vietnamese migrant paying $A prices in the heartland of the $A, it's barely enough to cover rent.

Whether or not they come with high ideals, when Vietnamese arrive in Australia, what they tend to notice first is that the weather is grossly inclement for half the year. Then they notice that everyone lives strangely cut off from each other in vast suburban dormitories. When they start getting out and about, they see that half the population is clinically obese, and that the beautiful bits of cities are where other people live - the places where to begin with they themselves can barely afford to travel by bus or buy coffee. . .

Even compared with Communist Vietnam, everything that takes place in public space seems weirdly over-regulated; there are traffic lights every 50m and the CBD is just an ugly and enraging series of traffic filtering devices; if you can't work out how to use the hi-tech ticketing machines on the trains, you get heavied for 15 minutes by security personnel carrying truncheons. Buy a car and double park it for two seconds and they'll sting you for half your monthly wage (a vastly distressing situation for Vietnamese - for whom double parking is truly a way of life). Try making any adjustment to the house you're living in and you'll need a lawyer to deal with six months of bullsh*t from local council. Try starting a small business and you won't need a cart, a couple of glass cabinets and some piping hot edibles, as you do in Vietnam, you'll need a Masters in tax law and an advanced diploma in OHS.

These are only small exaggerations of organized public craziness in one particular Western country. The point though is this: if you've lived most of your life in Vietnam, the reality of organized Western-style public craziness can make the standard Vietnamese way of regulating human activity in public space (i.e. to frame general laws and then sort out specific difficulties by handing a kickback to the guy who hands out the permits) seem rational, efficient and fun.

None of which is to say that Vietnamese don't often find it worthwhile to stay in places like Australia if they can wing it. Some of the hopes and idealism they bring with them are surely vindicated in the long run. Compared to Vietnam, Western schooling methods are relatively open-minded, the urban environment is a hell of a lot cleaner and the level of outright corruption in the legal system fairly minimal. At the most basic level, staying and successfully winging it means being able to send money to poorer relatives back home.

What the slightly exaggerated picture does suggest though is that a lot of scales fall from Vietnamese eyes once they reach the West. Many international students end up staying in Australia by finding the money to pay for further degrees in quasi-technical subjects they are totally uninterested in. Many recent migrants end up accepting a life of menial labour and in the nastier corners of Australian towns  and cities they resign themselves to living the life of second-class citizens. Being taunted every now and then by suburban rednecks for speaking their native language is something they get used to. Naturally, it's their kids they see as the real beneficiaries of their brave move away from Vietnam - at some indefinite point in the future.

If everything goes pear-shaped, then most of them can of course try their luck in Vietnam again. Australian university degrees do sometimes open up careers for international students back home. If they can bring enough of the cash they earn back to Vietnam with them, all those half-sad Vietnamese girls painting nails 70 hours a week in the suburbs mightn't regret their four years in Australia too much.

Going back to Vietnam first and foremost means trying to make good lost opportunities. If you've been in Australia for four years, those are four years you haven't been able to cultivate the sorts of connections that are vital to building careers back in Vietnam. For girls there's an extra dilemma. The pressure Vietnamese put on their daughters to marry in their mid-20's is intense, so unless said daughters come back to Vietnam with a nice Aussie boy, they might feel their four years downunder have made a mess of their marriage prospects.

Last but not least, going back means facing the music from all the friends and relatives who naively assumed that a country which produces so many tall, fair, long-nosed people must be some sort of social paradise.

How can it be that returning students don't grow taller, whiter and longer in the nose during all those years in the other place?

A lot of the time all they seem to bring back is attitude.

This in the end might be the bitterest drop that remains in the cup of Vietnamese internationals coming back from the West: the mild aversion they find themselves feeling to the messier features of Vietnamese life - to the noise, the crowds, the barnyard manners, the chaotic informality and sheer tackiness - in short to all the stuff that tall, fair, long-nosed Westerners tend to idealize when they come for their gap-year adventures. . .

15 Things about Vietnam #7 - Vietnamese Karaoke

A night at a karaoke bar is one of the most dependable communal joys of Vietnamese life. Most Vietnamese men think they can sing, even if they are tone-deaf and arrhythmic. Heavy consumption of draught beer has a key role to play in this situation.  

Essentially, there are three types of karaoke night that Vietnamese people tend to take part in nowadays.

The first is all-female karaoke, involving a select bunch of girls from the same, or occasionally different, walks of life. As in the West, karaoke is considered a perfect group activity for a hen's night - with one major difference: Vietnamese women never get blind drunk and they often don't drink at all. All-female karaoke tends to be marked by manifest feelings of warmth and togetherness:

Competitiveness is rare and this type of ending:

 

is unheard of.

The second type is what I would describe as all-male howling and lechery. Unlike Vietnamese women, Vietnamese men tend to drink very heavily when they go out for karaoke with their buddies. Unsurprisingly, this tends to increase the amount of soul they feel they are putting into their performances: 

 

It also of course affects their general levels of continence. Apart from singing out of tune, they spend a lot of their time daring each other to goose the waitress who appears every now and then to lay out more beer and snacks.

Once they have had a good howl, they often pack off to a massage parlour. Or the karaoke studio itself turns into a massage parlour. That's right, among the many types of karaoke studio that exist in today's Vietnam, there are places where the waitresses are paid to sit in the laps of the male clientele, or perform various repetitive operations upon the laps of the male clientele. . . We are talking about what the Vietnamese call "karaoke ôm". ("Ôm" here means "cuddle" and obviously has nothing to do with the mystical noise emitted by Buddhist monks in their efforts to reach wordless realms of spiritual intensity.)

Thirdly, we can say there is co-ed karaoke, which falls somewhere in between the first two types. It can be anything from fun to agony: fun, in my experience, when it involves the sort of jaunty display of taste and talent that karaoke involves in the rest of the world; agony when there are lots of couples involved, the men get wasted, and their wives/girlfriends have to sit around and watch.

Now, the key question here for a Western visitor to Vietnam is this: how much should you try to get involved in Vietnamese karaoke? One thing's for sure, if you want to make a massive hit of yourself in Vietnam, then learn to sing a few popular Vietnamese karaoke numbers.

Yes, you can always search karaoke machines for tinny arrangements of Queen or the Ramones. Some Vietnamese will be mildly impressed if you can hit the notes and get a bit of expression happening. But except for a few advanced youngsters, Vietnamese people deeply don't get Western music; they don't understand the lyrics and they doubly don't understand the attitudes that the music is meant to evoke.

You may think that Bohemian Rhapsody is a masterpiece of dark lyricism, that Bruce Springsteen is a rough diamond with a deep sense of social commitment or even that Abba is innocent, clean fun, but you're unlikely to convince normal Vietnamese people of the truth of these ideas, no matter how talented an amateur vocalist you are.

So what you should do if you plan on staying in Vietnam for more than two or three months, is take the plunge and learn to sing karaoke the Vietnamese way.

Before getting started, be advised though - even if you have considerable musical talent, getting your head around Vietnamese music is hard.

Except for the plainest pop music (Vpop), real Vietnamese music tends to be melodically quite messy. To Western ears, there are few simple tunes and even fewer simple chord progressions. So the songs are hard to listen to, and even harder to memorize.

And then there are the lyrics, which it's going to take you ages to learn properly: the Vietnamese language has ten different vowels and a range of consonants that look a bit like English consonants but sound like absolute nonsense when pronounced the English way.

Which is not to say a butchered version of a Vietnamese pop tune won't win you lots of friends and admirers. But which is to say - if you want to actually get good at Vietnamese karaoke, then a crash course at a Vietnamese language centre wouldn't go astray.

The other thing that makes Vietnamese karaoke hard to come at from a Western point of view is the sheer schlockiness of much of it. Vietnamese popular music just doesn't express that much of the toughness, weirdness, rage, boredom or sexual desire that the classics of Western music gave voice to from the 1960's onwards. Hot sassy women who want to make up their own lives are rare in the Vietnamese music world. So are cool, embittered men who see themselves as refugees from the dominant social order (with one main exception). What Vietnamese music tends to be about are traditional romantic themes: love, break-ups, separation, plus a whole lot of fuzzy nostalgic stuff about the natural beauty of your home village.

Unlike Westerners, Vietnamese men quite like to sing songs about the devotion of Vietnamese mothers to the family hearth. And Vietnamese girls really, really like to sing along to the soppy tunes of androgynous Korean boy-men with big hair and tears in their eyes.

 

To many Westerners, the result is incomprehensible, both musically and emotionally. And it's made worse by the way the songs are packaged in Vietnamese karaoke machines. While the hard-to-listen-to music plays, an even-harder-to-watch sequence of badly edited images starts up. Evocative shots of lotus ponds, nobbly hills and flowing brooks (or, even worse, evocative shots of major Vietnamese infrastructure projects) are spliced together to produce just the right mix of patriotism and provincial pride: something many Vietnamese find vastly satisfying, especially once they've put away half a dozen cans of Heineken. . .

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Karaoke has become such a big thing in Vietnam over the past 20 years that many middle class homes nowadays boast a karaoke room, as well as a more formal guest room. Vietnamese wives tend to like them - partly because of the way they project economic status, partly, I guess, because they deprive husbands of excuses for beery evenings at the local karaoke ôm.

The widespread Vietnamese ambition to be a fine karaoke singer spreads its influence well beyond the middle-class home though. Year by year, karaoke finds its way into more and more corners of social life.

As we learned a few days ago, once the speeches are over at Vietnamese wedding receptions the mike gets handed to any of the guests who'd like to make a show of their musical talents. The din that results often kills all possibility of conversation, in Vietnamese, English or any other language.

In more advanced form, karaoke takes over Vietnamese tv. In the absence of sensationalist current affairs, talent shows become the main point of interest for the majority of the prime-time audience.

In less advanced form, karaoke takes over your local takeaway, when business is slow in the late afternoon:

 

The popularity of karaoke may have led to the opening of large numbers of private singing schools, but whether it has increased the total amount of harmony in the world is doubtful. The music lessons that most Vietnamese kids get at school are pretty minimal, meaning there are a lot of Vietnamese out there who think of singing as one of their favourite hobbies, but whose ears and voices have had no musical training whatsoever.

Obviously I'm not saying you need to have gone to the Julliard School to be a useful addition to a Vietnamese karaoke night. But surely having a basic sense of tonality couldn't hurt. The songs that get sung during Vietnamese karaoke sessions may sound a bit off-key to Western ears. But the fact is the singers are way off-key themselves a lot of the time.

One thing you'll pick up on, if you stay in Vietnam for a while, is the surprising number of Vietnamese - mainly boys instead of girls - who go about their daily business unselfconsciously - and totally tunelessly - singing tender love-lyrics to themselves. For single Vietnamese men, singing to yourself seems to be a basic expression of romantic authenticity. But it's hard to listen to. And even harder to work out why they do it, given how few women are charmed by men who walk around bellowing in an undertone. . .

The answer of course lies in the institution of karaoke - that soft-edged, beery world which, in their dreams, some Vietnamese men would like to disappear into and never come out of again.

All the world's a stage?

For the younger generation of Vietnamese men, all the world's a studio - where you can serenade your sweetheart, memorialize your mum (and maybe make out with the waitress) - all day, every day, no matter where you are.